I like to use macOS's alias feature to not have to make redundant files. These aliases work great with Chrome and TextEdit. When I open them with vim, however, I get a giant messy file (presumably the way macOS encodes aliases). Is there a way to edit the actual file through an alias with vim?

1 Answer
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macOS aliases are just normal files. macOS knows when an alias is being accessed and passes the right file along to the app. Since aliases are just normal files, other tools just open the alias file itself rather than reading the contents of the file and finding where it points to.

If you actually want a link to another file, you can create a symbolic link instead of using aliases: